Some women laugh like the ocean

In their hands you’re but a tiny pawn

Don’t you ever cheat that kinda lady

She’ll take your soul and then be gone

—Bubbi Morthens, ‘Sumar konur’

I came to my senses in front of my computer, scraping the crud off my keyboard with a bobby pin. The report was due after the weekend. I walked into the hall and looked in the mirror. I hadn’t been out of the house in six days. The dishes in the dishwasher were clean, but everything else was dirty. I myself was both very unwashed and very unfed, a state I could drag out more or less forever. I could never decide which was worse: eating dirty or washing hungry. I found my phone and called Kata.

‘We’re going to the bar tonight,’ I said. It was the kind of fascist command that either worked or didn’t.

‘Yessss!’ she hissed on the other end of the line and hung up. I took that as a good sign. I put on an old Utangarðsmenn record and finished cleaning up the kitchen, polishing off the cookies on the counter.

*

The second I got out of the shower, I was another person, a better person. I found pink curlers in the bathroom cabinet, still in their plastic packaging, and then poured myself a glass of white wine and indulged in a smoke in the bathroom with the window open, just this once. It set the vibe. I switched records, put on Donna Summer, but then remembered that the album was scratched right at ‘Hot Stuff’, so I connected my computer to the speaker and played the song from there.

Putting in all the curlers took a lot longer than I’d expected, and it was also surprisingly painful. Halfway through, I asked the internet how to get that seventies feathered look. Every answer involved hairspray. I didn’t have any hairspray. I couldn’t remember having ever bought hairspray, not once in my life. So I googled ‘homemade hairspray’ and realised there was nothing to it: all you had to do was boil water and sugar and add a splash of liquor and oil.

Vodka, I had vodka. My computer moved onto Björgvin Halldórsson’s eighties classic ‘Himinn og jörð’, and then everything kicked into high gear. Bouncing in time with the song, I felt a surge of glee course through me; suddenly, everything was much, much better. This was how cows must feel when they’re finally let out to pasture after spending a long winter cooped up in a barn. I found a spray bottle filled with transparent kitchen cleaner under the sink and flushed the contents. The sax in Klíkan’s ‘Fjölublátt ljós við barinn’ started to wail.

Wait a sec – essential oil? That was some special kind of oil, right? Essential as in an essence – lavender or lotus or something like that. Not essential, as in necessary?

is okay to put olive oil insted of essensial oil homemade hairspray?

No hits. I opened the spice cabinet and found peppermint extract, added a few drops in lieu of the lavender stuff. Stirred it all up and somehow managed to pour the mixture into the spray bottle without spilling. I gave it a good shake. Then I stationed myself back in front of the hall mirror and gave the curlers a liberal spritz. Okay, the scent was pretty strong – a saccharine, Christmas scent – but it would probably fade as the night went on. I checked my phone and saw that a certain bruce had sent me a message, said we should stay in touch that night. I wrote hahahaha but then deleted it because he could have taken that to mean I was bitter (which I wasn’t – or not anymore, at least).

I found a red silk handkerchief in the sideboard in the hall and experimentally knotted it around my neck. I felt cool with the cigarette, the apple-red lipstick and the curlers. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Kata’s outline through the matt window in the front door. I jumped back to the wall with my hand on the doorknob, ready to give her a fright, but at the last second I caught a glimpse of a bottle under her arm and thought better of it.

Kata rang the doorbell. I counted to five and opened the door slowly. She stepped inside but then stopped short.

‘What’s that smell?’ she asked. I showed her the spray bottle and the curlers.

‘I’m going for a feathered thing,’ I said, giving my hair another spritz. Kata started coughing and I took the opportunity to wiggle the bottle out from under her armpit. It was tequila, the label in Spanish.

‘Ricardo,’ said Kata, her voice strangled, a cough still lodged in her throat. ‘He was saving it.’

‘That’s karma, baby,’ I said as I bent to scoop up all the old circulars on the hall floor (this despite the fact that I’d stuck a handwritten sign in the front window that said NO JUNK MAIL but I guess you have to get one of those special stickers for any of these bozos to take you seriously).

‘He showed up twice this week and clung to my doorframe, weeping. Says he’s an hombre sin alma. He’s just testing me.’

We went into the kitchen. The folk song ‘Sumar konur’ echoed from the speaker. I got out glasses, lemons, ice.

‘You just have to laugh like the ocean, baby,’ I quoted from the song, lighting myself another cigarette and pouring some tequila for the both of us. ‘Ice-cold.’ I lifted my glass, and Kata gave it a quick clink with her own and drank.

I’d never tasted real-deal tequila before. It was really good. Kata walked over to the speakers and turned them up, sang along. I joined in.

‘And tonight, my brothers will weep . . . ’

‘I hope Ricardo weeps tonight. God, I love this song.’

Kata was wearing a leather jacket that hung down just past her butt and bell-bottom jeans. She rolled herself a cigarette and then we stood there listening for a moment, me leaning against the kitchen counter, Kata against the sink. I felt a sudden swelling of almost unaccountable happiness, mixed with gratitude; there was nothing in this world that was better than a good girlfriend.

‘Kata,’ I said, and winked at her, grinning. ‘You and I are on the same wavelength.’

But she was lightyears away. She stared blankly at me for a few beats until my words reached her. Then she tuned back in, smiled.

‘That we are.’

‘What does that even mean, anyway?’ I asked, nodding in the direction of the computer. “Women who laugh like the ocean conceal sea-scoured skerries in their breasts”?’

Kata pursed her lips and slowly exhaled a lungful of smoke.

‘Well, let’s see. Play it again.’

Some women laugh like the ocean

In their hands you’re but a tiny pawn

Don’t you ever cheat that kinda lady

She’ll take your soul and then be gone

And tonight,

My brothers will weep

And tonight,

My brothers will weep

With hearts broken and blue

When you wake up a man without a soul

You’ll look back on the source of your unrest

And know that women who laugh like the ocean

Conceal sea-scoured skerries in their breasts

‘I don’t really know,’ she said when the song was over. And I don’t really get what the song is trying to say, either. Are we supposed to feel bad for these guys who are cheating on their girlfriends?’ She crossed her arms. ‘They only have themselves to blame, those bastards. It’s a heartbreak entirely of their own making.’

My cheeks were aching from smiling so much and I gave myself a little face massage. Kata leaned over to the computer and played the song a third time. When we got to the sea-scoured-breast bit, Kata threw up her hands.

I shrugged. ‘Is it not just, like, cruelty? The cruelty we pass on to one another?’

‘It’s kind of funny, don’t you think, him saying: “Don’t ever cheat that kind of lady,” as if there’s nothing problematic about cheating some other kind?’ asked Kata. ‘Like, watch yourself around the ones who won’t let you get away with it?’

‘Yeah, it’s kind of clumsy,’ I admitted. ‘But isn’t he’s just talking about the original sin?’

Kata looked at me obtusely.

‘The fall from grace,’ I added. Her facial expression didn’t change.

‘Alright, Premise Number One.’ I held up my index finger. ‘Marriage is a symbol of spiritual love. Marriage and the soul are on the same team.’ I held up my middle finger. ‘Premise Number Two: you cheat on your wife and fall prey to the temptation of the flesh. The body and the soul are enemies.’ Kata had started smiling like I had something on my face. ‘Which brings us to this excellent argument – that by cheating on your wife, you are casting out your own soul and will therefore end up soulless.’ I clapped my hands neatly together to emphasise my conclusion.

‘But he doesn’t say if you cheat on your wife. No, he’s off singing about some special type of woman who laughs like the sea!’ she shouted, spitting fire once again, or at the very least smoke. ‘“Laughing like the ocean” just means not giving a shit. It isn’t cruelty people are passing around; it’s indifference.’ Kata took a sip from her glass of tequila and gazed into the middle distance. ‘These are women who’ve been hurt by indifference and armour themselves with laughter. Just like you and me.’

I decided it was best to nod along. My computer started playing Grýlurnar’s version of ‘Don’t Think Twice’. I went over to Kata and poured us both some more tequila. Then I elbowed her in time with the ‘Why babe, why babe’ refrain. Tried again to massage the grin out of my cheeks. Maybe I had cabin fever. I couldn’t help but shimmy my shoulders along with the song. Shimmy my hips. Kata looked at me and I managed to coax a smile out of her. Then she rested her head on my shoulder and sighed.

*

The new ping-pong table had taught me something, namely that the more space I had, the more clutter I amassed. The table was three times wider than my old desk, but its surface looked exactly the same. My laptop was awash in a sea of papers and magazines, candy wrappers, books, dirty toast plates. A French press filled with old coffee grounds.

‘You need to rent an office with other freelancers,’ said Kata, watching me sift through the detritus. ‘This cave life you’re living can’t be healthy for you in the long run. Socially speaking.’

‘It’s just so expensive to leave the house.’ I swept pistachio shells into my palm and deposited them on my grandma’s old sideboard. Kata took up position in front of the balcony door with the ping-pong ball.

‘Wait a sec,’ I said. ‘Let’s make this Frau-from-Hamburg-style ping-pong.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a combination of ping-pong and Frau from Hamburg. You remember that game?’

‘Yeah, but then we’ll have to be reasoning and ping-ponging at the same time.’

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘Kata, we need to stop thinking so dualistically and start cultivating our metaphysical faculties within the material world. God is dead!’

‘Then why were you going on about the body and soul before?’

‘That was different. I was talking about the song.’

‘You are beyond saving.’

‘Come on,’ I said, feeling my smile muscles twitch again. ‘It’ll be good for you. You remember the rules, right? You can’t say yes or no. You can’t say black or white. That’s it. So: what did you do with the money the Frau from Hamburg gave you?’

‘Bought a flight home from Hamburg,’ said Kata in a monotone, giving in.

‘Excellent!’ I said. ‘Home to Iceland?’

‘Home to Iceland,’ she confirmed.

‘And did you spend all the money on the ticket?’ The ash on my cigarette had gotten alarmingly long and there was nothing in sight that I could use as a makeshift ashtray. The ping-pong ball shot back and forth over the net.

‘Almost. The rest I spent on an old-fashioned mousetrap that I plan to hide in Ricardo’s pants.’

*

Kata: a woman who is everything good in the superlative. The funnest. The prettiest. The smartest. We were sitting in the living room, had just finished eating our delivery pizza. The tequila bottle on the coffee table was a lot emptier than it had been when they started.

‘Kata, you are everything good in the superlative,’ I said from my loveseat.

‘I know,’ said Kata, not looking up from her phone. We were listening to ‘Low Rider’ by War. I’d just taken the curlers out and was looking like a total babe. Total babe. It was enough, I thought, to just be sitting there on the sofa with my tequila and lemon and my cigarette, nodding my head in time with the song. I’d have been happy to do that all night. Now and then I got a whiff of peppermint, but that was a price I was willing to pay.

‘What a fucking idiot,’ sighed Kata, still bent over her phone.

‘Just remember, you never signed up to be a one-woman rescue team,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she sighed. She was perched on the sofa like a sinking ship, her butt on the edge and her head on a cushion as she shifted her gaze up to the ceiling. ‘I know it’s not my responsibility, but I’m scared he’s going to kill himself.’

‘You’ve done everything you can do,’ I answered. ‘He has to rescue himself now.’

Kata puffed her cheeks up like balloons before heaving another sigh. Then she stood up and put on Beyoncé. My phone lit up – more messages from the bruce. I turned my phone face down. Kata and I listened to ‘Sorry’ in silence.

‘Okay, but why did she have to tell us to suck on her balls?’ asked Kata. ‘Wouldn’t it have been stronger to go for something feminine? Invent some new lingo?’

‘I think she’s appropriating the language of power.’

‘But then later on in the album, she inverts it, saying she’ll take him to Red Lobster, but only when he fucks her good,’ said Kata, reaching for my tobacco. ‘I guess that’s always the question: whether a woman should claim power in a dress or trousers.’

‘There was a brief moment when I waged that kind of gendered grammar warfare,’ I said, sitting up in my seat. ‘I decided I’d never say “clitoris” again. Remember that? Swore I’d eliminate it from my vocabulary. That lasted, like, all of ten days.’

‘What did you call it instead?’

‘The queen.’

‘The queen?’

‘Well, we call the male glans kóngur – “king”. I even sent a letter to the Icelandic Medical Association requesting that they submit it to the medical terminology index.’

‘You did what!?’ said Kata with a laugh.

‘There were other things, too, but I don’t remember what they all were now. Or wait, yeah, whenever I talked to my little cousins about sex, I always used verbs that emphasised what the woman was doing, rather than the man.’

‘Like what?’

‘So, I’d say that I plopped onto someone, for instance.’

A strange drowning noise gurgled from Kata, who’d been mid-swallow and was now half choking on tequila. She held a clenched fist over her mouth and howled, her mouth still full of liquor. It was very funny.

I laughed quite hard at this.

‘Sorry, your little cousins?’ she crowed once she’d managed to swallow. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve.

‘Not like little-little,’ I said, shaking with mirth. ‘Like, fourteen or fifteen.’

That was enough to send us over the edge. Kata cackled, rolled onto her side on the sofa. The endorphins took over, drove our laughter like a rickety station wagon.

It took us a minute to settle back down.

‘You’re not normal,’ Kata said once she could talk again.

I dried my tears and sighed loudly. ‘This is how you change the world: you start with those who look up to you.’

*

It was almost midnight. Friday, and it was nice out. My curls bounced with every step. I walked to the beat of ‘Stayin’ Alive’, which was playing on a loop in my head. As we were leaving my place, Kata had grabbed my arm and asked if we could go down to the ocean first, which I agreed to, albeit reluctantly, because although the weather was clear, it was still pretty cold out.

The shortest route to the shore was to cut through downtown and then drop down to Sæbraut. But about halfway there, on Skólavörðustígur, Kata started glancing around. ‘Maybe we should grab a quick one beforehand?’ she asked.

This seemed like a smart move to me. It’d be a pity not to show off this incredible hair before the wind ruined it. We dipped into one of our regular bars and ordered more tequila and lime on the rocks.

‘This is like calling Chicago Town a pizza,’ said Kata, scraping her tongue with her front teeth.

‘Excuse me!’ I shouted to the bartender. ‘You gave us Chicago Town tequila!’

He shot something back at us and Kata shot something back at him and he gave us a different kind of tequila. It was a little better.

‘Talk about pawns,’ said Kata, looking contemptuously at a group of leather jacket-clad men standing at the bar. ‘They think we’ve got cardboard for tastebuds.’ At that, a young man walked by and complimented my hair. I didn’t fully take in his face, but I did notice that he had a beautiful gap between his front teeth.

‘Nice gap,’ I said over my shoulder. He didn’t hear me. Kata hooked her arm through mine, and we found ourselves a high-top table in the back. We attempted to make conversation for two, three minutes, but the music was awful, impossible to ignore. The guy manning the DJ booth was absolutely not on our wavelength. I pulled out my tobacco and Kata nodded. It was jam-packed out in the smoking area. We kissed some cheeks and chatted a little. Then, suddenly, the guy with the tooth gap was standing right in front of me. He was talking to me.

‘That’s a really beautiful tooth gap you’ve got there,’ I said. He stopped mid-sentence and started laughing. ‘Beautiful dimples, too.’

‘Listen, bruce,’ said Kata, holding her index finger up to God. ‘These breasts conceal sea-scoured skerries.’

‘Why is she calling me Bruce?’ asked Tooth Gap.

‘Because you look like a guy who listens to Springsteen and romanticises your faults,’ I explained, nodding maternally. He needed to hear it. It is what he looked like. Then we made out a little before Kata and I hit the road.

*

Sæbraut, with its seaside walking path, awaited us, alone and lonely. Kata put an arm around my shoulders. ‘Indifferent. It’s the only way to go about this.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘That hairspray really is quite something.’

‘I know,’ I admitted.

‘It’s the only way: to play it cool. Ice-cold, like the ocean.’

‘This is exactly why Frau from Hamburg should be, like, on the national curriculum!’ I shouted. ‘Why does everything have to be black and white? Women aren’t just hot-blooded or cold-hearted.’

‘And yet, we’re always either submissive or overbearing.’

‘Okay, wait. Premise Number One,’ I said, taking pains to enunciate my words. ‘You should never lose hope.’ Kata signalled her agreement with one sharp nod, like a soldier. ‘Premise Number Two: if you hope too much, you’re in for disappointment.’ Kata nodded again. ‘Premise Number Three,’ I said, lifting my ring finger. ‘It is possible to both hold on to hope and to avoid disappointment.’ We’d made down to the shore, to the Sun Voyager statue. It was cold and the darkness was orange.

I squinted at Kata. She wasn’t entirely in focus. ‘And what conclusion can we draw from these excellent premises?’

‘That you can laugh like the ocean and cry like it, too,’ she answered.

‘Exactly.’

*

Translated by Larissa Kyzer

Lyrics of ‘Sumar konur’ [‘Some Women’] used with the kind permission of the artist

Author’s note: In Icelandic folktales, the ruthlessness of the wild landscape and the dangers of unpredictable weather are often personified as wicked female beings – the wrath of elves, hidden women, and giantesses dwelling in cliffs, mountains and jagged skerries. These stories served a practical purpose: they marked dangerous places and frightened children into keeping their distance.

Elves and Hidden People, or huldufólk, are terms that are often used interchangeably in Iceland. However, when one studies the folklore, it’s easy to see that stories of elves are imported from mainland Europe’s fairytales and fables of elf queens and kings, dancing in forests – which Iceland is devoid of. Hidden People, however, live in the rugged, bare landscape, in boulders and grey cliffs; they are invisible beings that most often appear to humans in dreams, often to warn of pending misfortune or ask for aid.

This story alludes to The Wrath of the Hidden Woman, a tale of sharp, rocky skerries with a treacherous, hungry undercurrent. A young hidden woman lived in these rocks, and a young human man fell in love with her. His mother, however, persuaded him to marry a human girl instead. He rowed across the fjord to fetch his new bride, but that evening a storm rose. In a dream, the hidden woman appeared to his mother, laughing, and told her that she had enacted her revenge. The mother woke in terror, ran to the shore and found the boat smashed on the rocks, her son lost to the sea, and the human bride driven mad.